YMMV / Banlieue 13

Edit Locked

Angst? What Angst?: Lola has been kept drug-addicted as a personal pet/slave for month. It's implied that he's been Taha's sex slave as well. She was very nearly burned alive. Yet by the end of the movie, she seems as chipper and upbeat as ever.

Complete Monster: Taha Ben Mahmoud from the first film is a brutal Parisian drug lord who kills anyone he doesn't like, especially his own minions. He controls the largest gang-run ghetto which the government walled off from the rest of the city to stop the further spread of crime. He's largely responsible for the deterioration in the district, but unlike the government he takes an active hand in making things worse by terrorizing the population to submit to his rule and dumping his drugs there. When a group of his minions fail to recover a large stash stolen by Leito, he shoots them in quick succession until one of them comes up with an idea. When Leito and his sister Lola almost have him arrested, he uses his power to makes a deal with the cops to imprison Leito instead. He takes Lola so he can keep her as a beaten, drug-addicted sex slave on a leash in his personal quarters. When a nuclear bomb goes missing and is found by his gang, he considers selling it to arms dealers before blackmailing the police and the government with the lives of 2 million people by aiming it at the city centre with a missile launcher. He chains up Lola to the missile for good measure so she'll be incinerated by the launch.

Critic-Proof: Received an awful critical reception in France (probably because the film toys with national ordeals in a very politically incorrect fashion), but didn't do too badly in the box office.

When Lola comes out of a drug induced haze on the roof, she notices she's chained directly below the bomb. Does she freak out and try to escape? Nope, she immediately tries to damage or disable the bomb.

Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The film was badly received by French critics, but the rest of the world loved it, to the point to be considered one of the two foreign films which helped to dissolve the Chinese monopoly in the martial arts cinema (the other being Ong-Bak). Also, many Le Parkour practitioners from around the globe cite it as their gateway to the sport.

He Really Can Act: Granted, they are not going to win any Oscars, but David Belle and Cyril Raffaelli really break out in this film, because it's easy to forget you are seeing two stuntmen with little to no acting experience when you look at the charismatic Leito and Damien. The fact they have done little aside of this work is quite a waste of talent.

What Taha does to Lola, getting her hooked on drugs and turning her into a human pet so he can frequently physically (and it is implied, also sexually) abuse her. When he grows bored of her, he makes sure the catatonic Lola will be burned alive.

How Leito kills the corrupt police chief in the beginning - by yanking his head through the prison bars (causing blood to pour from his ears) and then decapitating him by slamming his head down.

Relationship Writing Fumble: It really does seem like Lola was supposed to be Leito's lover, not sister at various points. At one point early on, she tells a mook who likes her moxie "sorry, but I'm taken"... and the only guy she's interacted with on screen was Leito.

Signature Scene: The opening chase/escape sequence is probably what everyone remembers the most about the film.

What an Idiot: Minister of Defence Krueger could have get a more effective plan to take out the District 13 if the detonation code of the bomb had been a random number and not a mix of suspicious revealing digits (the code of the district, the exact date, etc). Admittedly, Leito would have probably deduced it anyways thanks to the rest of tracks, but the code was still a vital clue and proved to Damien that something was amiss.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy